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Insurmountable Waist Height Fence
alt title(s): Insurmountable Waist High Fence
The Adventurers encounter an Insurmountable Waist-High Chair.

Soldier: It's a chest-high wall, Mr. Smarty Pants. Got any more dumb ideas? Maybe we can crowbar it away? Or kick under it? Or gravity gun through it?
Frohman: Or climb over it?
Soldier: Or climb over it?
—Concerned

"Hey, uh, there's this little wall in my way that I could easily jump over, but it's not giving me, like, the 'jump overing' command. What should I do?"
—Leon Kennedy, Resident Awesome 4

The phenomenon, found in countless video games, in which a seemingly trivial obstacle — such as a Locked Door — cannot be circumvented or removed with brute force, no matter how powerful the player character(s) is/are. This is more jarring when the obstacle in question does not mark the edge of the gameworld, but rather serves to force the player into taking a particular path.

There are several variations of the Insurmountable Waist Height Fence, such as:
  • The Frictionless Hill, where you can jump onto the hillside, only to slide off as if the thing were coated in an industrial lubricant.
    • It must be noted that sometimes, usually due to minor glitching, these can be passed with enough effort. Usually by having your character clip into the offending hill or hill-like object while holding the jump button. Or by tapping it while looking for "sweetspots" like clippable ledges, as in games like GTA and Halo 2. Do trial and error tests first. Some, such as 3DO's PO'ed have cumulative jumps, meaning taking the side of a steeply sloped nuclear bomb shelter at the wrong speed and/or angle will result in the character being vertically catapulted over 300 feet into the air upon reaching the top, only to tumble to his doom.
  • The Indestructible Fallen Log, which presents you with a fallen tree which, despite your having nuclear weapons in your arsenal, can't even be chipped.
  • The Adamantium Door, similar to the Indestructible Fallen Log, but in door form.
  • Invisible Walls. Literally.
    • Or worse, Invisible Death Barriers.
  • The Gentle Slope of Unclimbability, which is a slightly inclined piece of land which, despite all logic to the contrary, is completely impassable, both up and down.
  • The Ledge of Instant Death, a de-facto Bottomless Pit, that looks safe to jump down from, but kills you anyway. Seen in the Halo series, the latter two of which lack falling damage for normal falls, but falling in the wrong place kills you, preventing Sequence Breaking.
  • And Knee (or Ankle) Deep Water of Uncrossability, in which anything deeper than a mud puddle may as well be a bottomless pit as far as your ability to ford it is concerned. And that's assuming your character doesn't have Super Drowning Skills as well.

Compare Soup Cans, Border Patrol. See also Broken Bridge. Not to be confused with the one-foot-tall brick wall.

Examples

Film

  • In a truly odd film example in the remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Veruca's father was seeming unable to climb over a waist high safety fence until it was unlocked. He merely stared on as his daughter was overwhelmed by an army of trained squirrels, as she screams and struggles against them dragging her to her doom.
  • In the film Hot Shots!: Part Deux, this trope is ridiculed when a commando unit escaping hostile territory finds their path blocked by a waist-high fence (with a locked wicket) and breaks down in hysterical despair.
    • When Harbinger tells the demolitionist, "Blow it," he responds "It's not our property."
    • In the same movie, a prisoner is confined to a cell with bars wide enough to step through, and another one near the end is crippled and unable to walk because the guards tied his shoelaces together.
  • Mel Brooks enjoys parodying this trope as well. In Blazing Saddles, an invading horde is slowed down by a tollbooth which forces the horde to go in single file and look for change, despite the fact they could easily go around it. In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Little John is able to guard the only bridge across a river and forces Robin Hood to fight him to get across, despite the fact that the river is only a few inches wide and deep. The latter example is lampshaded: Achoo explains and demonstrates that the river could be just as easily jumped as crossed on a bridge, but Robin replies that fighting Little John is a matter of principle.
  • Parodied in The Simpsons Movie, where a concrete barricade of a similar height was all that was needed to idiot-proof the river to ensure no more illegal dumping (Of course the resident idiot, Cletus, was used to test it. Even more of course, they tested it using the wrong idiot...)
    • Which only goes to prove that when someone makes a thing idiot proof, someone else will find a bigger idiot.
  • The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy did this at the end of the film, with the Vogons going around a large, fenced in yard because the gate was locked from the other side. It was barely waist high for them, and they could have easily reached over and unlatched it. But, being Vogons...
    • "Oh no! Now we'll have to go around!"
  • The Truman Show, which literally had a wall at its "horizon".

Webcomics
  • This has been parodied in dozens of comics. This from Adventurers! is one example this editor finds iconic enough.
    • Another one from the same comic is featured above.
  • Episode #172 of the webcomic Concerned made fun of this trope as it applies to the game Half Life 2.
  • Parodied in Homestar Runner 's Nintendo Hard homage platformer Stinkoman 20X6, where the titular hero spends an entire level jumping over a small wall.
    • To be fair, the wall is just a little higher than Stinkoman's jump. Why the jump is so small is probably a whole other trope.
  • Parodied in Shape Quest, when Lance encounters a log in the road.
  • There is an animated .gif floating around the internet where someone wants to open a door. It proceeds to summon mecha, fire missles, bash at it with oversized swords and hammers and finally drop a nuke whose explosion can be seen from space. When he is exhausted, the door finally swings open inwardly.
    • I'm pretty sure you mean what this links to.
      • Or, to put it another way, this◊. Yes, I think that's what he means
  • Penny Arcade: the one thing the Physical God Cole McGrath from Infamous can never defeat? A chainlink fence.

Real Life
  • Truth In Television: This troper's brother tried to climb over a waist-high fence and broke his arms.
    • How? Did he try to climb it from a speeding motorcycle?
  • And this troper has encountered ankle-deep streams that he was unwilling to ford. However, most video-game rivers are placid lowland rivers, not the spring-flood-swollen mountain stream that had risen to be ankle-deep over the now-incredibly-slippery footbridge.
    • Methinks the games that include this trope would be a lot more tolerable if the impassable rivers were slippery paths of death, where you could walk into them, but would be swept off your feet and downstream over the Inevitable Waterfall, and then appearing back on the riverbank in some fashion, going "Oh, man, I'm never trying that again!"
      • ...and then subverting that lesson with a spot that you can ford, later on... for a secret area many will never find.
  • This man is no Altair.
  • Arena Football is played in an arena surrounded by waist-high walls, which regularly feature large men running into them, and about once per game, over them. Despite that, every Arena Football game that this troper has ever been to had lots of small children - even lap babies - in the front row, parents presumably believing that the waist-high wall protects them.
  • In Santorini, often the only thing keeping you from going wherever you want are waist-high fences with "Private Property" signs on them. Some paths are also blocked by doors with no walls around them just jutting out of the ground. This Troper loves it.
  • This little dog is the living embodiment of this trope.
  • Hadrian's Wall in England. Black Adder Back and Forth references it when Edmund and Baldrick go back in time and meet their Roman counterparts, and they overhear the Roman version of Edmund wondering how a three foot tall stone wall was supposed to hold back the Scots.

Video Games
  • Eternal Darkness has a couple of puzzles where the door can only be opened by solving two puzzles. However, solving the first opens the door to just under head height, making the completely land based characters seem even more stupid. Its easy to justify with the fat characters and squishy priest, but the more physically active characters have no excuse.
    • Also justified by the doors of impassibility in that either the characters don't want to leave or are physically incapable of manipulating the door or getting to the exit.
  • Team Fortress 2 has a commentary node (on tc_hydro) about how its conspicuous waist-high fences are Lampshade Hanging and a major theme of the game.
  • "Phantasy Star Universe" has waist high fences in lobby areas regularly. What makes them so evil? Unlike most insurmountable waist high fences, where there is a way around, or nothing on the other side of interest, these fences REALLY DO have content on the other side that you can't get to. SEGA unlocks content, which already exists and was installed with the game, over time, letting them profit on your monthly fees; so you pay money for a few months in the hopes theyll yank down that fence. It's just cruel.
  • No More Heroes features insurmountable ankle-height curbs in various parts of Santa Destroy, the illusory "open" world of the game. The absence of a jump button doesn't help. Poor design, or a clever Lampshade Hanging? Hard to tell with this game.
  • The mention in the comic of "white picket fences" and "tufts of grass" is almost certainly a reference to the 1982 game Smurf Rescue, in which white picket fences and tufts of grass were obstacles that must be jumped over...because if you touched them, they killed you.
  • BLACK features a truly ridiculous example where a knee-high pile of rubble can only be scaled in one direction because there's a plank on that side forming a ramp. This Troper came to calling this phenomenon 'The Invisible Wheelchair' after the device the protagonist is obviously confined to.
    • Black almost has more invisible walls and insurmountable fences than plot. Every mission is filled with situations like the one described above. In one mission you descend a staircase, only to notice that the last step is missing when you get down to the floor below. This missing step, only about 10 centimeters high, makes it impossible to go back the way you entered. The fact that you can't jump in the game only makes these situations more ridiculous.
    • Black takes the silliness to further extremes. Many of the waist-high fences can literally be destoyed (by you or the bad guys)...but passing over them is still impossible. And the enemies can jump over whatever the heck they want.
  • The game Battlefield: Bad Company by all means averts this, as one of the game's advertised selling features most awesome parts is the fact at least 90% of the environment happens to be destructible. Yes, that includes that entire village of houses and any waist-high fences you might see. Now the edge of the battlefield where the enemy starts lobbing artillery shells at you, on the other hand..
  • Countless examples of locked doors seemingly made of flimsy wood being impervious to explosives of all kinds. In Half Life , Gordon Freeman couldn't knock down locked doors with any of the explosives he was carrying, which included grenades and demolition charges. In its expansion pack "Opposing Force" the character of Adrian Sheppard, despite being a trained marine, cannot breach doors unless he enlists the help of an NPC with a blowtorch. Even worse, the NPC must be kept alive during an Escort Mission, if he's killed, the game ends. Sheppard apparently can't just take the blowtorch from the fallen man and use it himself.
    • Possibly subverted in Portal, whose last level is rife with Half-Life-style obstacles that are easily bypassed through the use of the Portal Gun.
      • But also has locked doors.
      • But the locked doors don't have normal handles, but what looks like keypads on them. It's not exactly ridiculous doing it this way, and would an entire building without multiple branching doors/paths/rooms make any sense?
  • The old RPG Robinson's Requiem abused this trope to death. There were multiple occurrences of Frictionless Hills, Indestructible Logs, One Inch Too High Ledges, and perhaps most annoyingly Gentle Slopes of Unclimbability that sometimes required you to go through caves, jungles and deserts to get to the other side. It was even more maddening when you consider the Slope was 5 meters long and with a 20 degree incline.
  • The Brothers in Arms games feature highly physically fit paratroopers who are unable to surmount fences and earthen walls that seemingly only reach them to the waist. Curiously enough, during scripted attacks some enemies are capable of jumping over said fences.
    • In the second game Sergeant Matt Baker, an NPC who was the player character in the first game, can be seen climbing over one of those low fences that he could not traverse when he was controlled by the player.
    • Finally, in the as yet unreleased third game, all characters (NPCs and player alike) will supposedly be capable of vaulting over fences, sandbags, and the like - and a bazooka or machinegun will rip through them, too.
  • The 3D Final Fantasy games generally lack any kind of parkour or jumping, making even the slightest ridge an effective barrier — though the player can jump in Final Fantasy X-2, which has the interesting effect that the same geography which had appeared in Final Fantasy X could, in places, be approached differently, sometimes allowing new areas to be seamlessly integrated into existing locations. Final Fantasy XII, however, is full of them, including the Knee Deep Water of Uncrossability and the Indestructible Fallen Log. Apparently being able to rend the very fabric of space and time with your magic isn't enough to budge an overgrown twig.
    • Final Fantasy XI also contains some particularly irritating examples of this. They don't mark the end of the game world, nor are they a plot element - they just make it take a couple more minutes to get from place to place.
      • Like that accursed rock in Qufim Island that doesn't let players pass between it in the wall, despite there being clearly enough space to do so, and forces them to instead go around the other side and just hope they don't get killed by the living weapon waiting within hearing range. Anyone who plays FFXI knows what I'm talking about.
      • Worse than the accursed rock in Qufim Island, there is the tiny, almost unnoticable ledge by the final Notorious Monster tower in Dynamis - Xarcabard that while being only two or three ilms (in game term for an inch) high, far smaller than any character's stride, somehow it is as insurmountable as it it were the tallest cliff face.
    • In Final Fantasy IX it is actually impossible, (at least while exploring the Alexandrian castle in the timed sequence) to step from the paved sidewalk in front of the west tower, onto the lawn right next to it. That blades of grass could be an insurmountable obstacle for anyone bothers this troper greatly.
  • Each Star Wars game in which the player can use a lightsaber. In the movies and various other media, these have been used to cut through several-inch-thick Unobtainium-steel doors. In the games, they typically have no effect on any barriers whatsoever. Knights of the Old Republic 2 actually allowed you to bash open doors with your lightsaber, but there were still "magnetically sealed" doors that resisted all force.
    • This is potentially useful for preventing the player from cutting down a bridge they need to cross, or from breaking an exterior window on a spaceship, but ...
      • This troper was EXTREMELY saddened when in the demo for a Star Wars: Episode I game, he couldn't cut through the walls of the spaceship. Someday, maybe. Someday.
      • Unfortunately in The Force Unleashed you do not use the Lightsaber to open doors. However, slamming them open with Force Push is much, much more satisfying and pretty. Unfortunately 90% of these are 'main path' anyways, but damn is it fun.
      • And you can, and will, break exterior spaceship windows in hallways. But after any about a second where person or bit of scenery nearby will be sucked out, large steel blast cover seal them off. Interesting, if you stand immediately next to one of the windows, you are unaffected.
      • Even more interesting is that technically, your Lightsaber can cut through walls: If you time it right, you can throw it out of the window, have the blast cover come down and see your Lightsaber cut right through it/the nearest wall. Granted it's a trick but it can make you wonder why you can't just cut your way through.
  • The player character's behavior in the Myst series would seem to indicate that you are an extremely polite crippled geriatric... If not for your ability to rocket up and down flimsy ladders at absurd speeds.
  • Related, in Myst III: Exile. How many tropers out there have suspected that they could have taken Saavedro hand to hand? This situation was avoided in Myst II: Riven, as Gehn and his goons always had you behind bars, or covered by lethal projectile weapons, or both.
    • Riven contained a great subversion as well: early on you encounter a flimsy wooden door sealed with a padlock. This door is insurmountable... unless you crawl under it.
  • In Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, the player can climb or jump — but cannot climb or jump over fences eighteen inches high, barbed wire lying flat on the ground, or the game's ubiquitous traffic barricades. (But at one point, his path is blocked by a simple wooden gate. Jumping against it will knock it down.)
  • The Xenosaga series has particularly stupid example of this. Players will enter areas in their extremely large mecha, but solve a puzzle in order to circumvent a two-foot barrier. This is despite the fact that these robots fly during battle.
    • An even stupider combination of this and Broken Bridge appears in Xenogears. A small child accidentally leaves her stuffed animal in front of the door to the bridge of your sandship. This makes it completely impossible to enter the bridge until you find her and get her to move it. Even worse, the characters immediately declare this to each other.
  • With Lampshade Hanging, when you encounter a certain unopenable door in The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, your AI Sidekick comments, "I've got a feeling that the room behind this door has neither been modeled nor rendered." Similarly, the original Journeyman Project makes you take the lift straight from your 4th floor apartment to the ground floor transporter booth that takes you to work. Pressing floors 2 or 3 receives a reply of "Access denied; this floor was never modeled nor rendered."
    • And if you pick the wrong transport destination, Have A Nice Death.
    • This troper was disappointed the other floors in Shadow Moses on MGS 4 weren't selectable, expecting to at least here exactly that as the reason, considering all the other lampshade hanging Otacon was doing. Oddly enough he did flub one lampshading. The tank conversation is pretty much disproved by the amount of tankbashing basic infantrymen did with subpar explosives during the second world war, especially on the Soviet side. There is also a legend about some Aussies who took on a Panzer III with an MG-variant Bren carrier, and managed to pry the hatch open to take over the tank, which would be more in line with the gasping fanboyism Otacon was displaying over Snake.
  • The Sims in The Sims and its sequel cannot pass between squares separated by walls or fences, which led to the ridiculous experience of surrounding a Sim with an ankle-high white picket fence and watching him starve to death, unable to cross it. As a means of a "fix", The Sims 2 includes higher-than-waist fences only.
    • It does, however, have lower-than-ankle-length fences to put around flower beds, but Sims can step over those without problem.
    • Sims also cannot climb out of a pool without a ladder. They would sooner drown than simply climb up the ledge that's only inches above the water line.
    • Why even bother with fences? It is much more amusing to watch your Sims die after being surrounded by pink-flamingo lawn ornaments. That's what they get for pissing in the kitchen when every other room contains a toilet...
    • The insurmountable objects (fences, bushes, plant, etc) even apply when the sim is above them i.e. put a bush next to the bed while the sim is sleeping and they will be unable to get out of the bed when they wake up, even if the bed is taller than the unpassable object. And since the sims can't die in bed this leads to an endless loop of them trying and failing to get out of bed even after they should have starved to death.
    • My Sims has a number of areas blocked off by being boarded up, having a fallen log across the path, having a random pile of rocks in the way, or there being a metal door there. You start the game with an axe. You cannot use it to chop down the boards or chop up the logs; you have to wait until you get the crowbar and saw, respectively. You cannot climb over the rocks, or over the fence into the desert. You have to earn the pickaxe first. At one point, a door blocks a bridge with no rails on it. You can enter the water in most places where it exists, but you cannot pull yourself out of it onto the bridge. Looks like earning the blowtorch is the only way to go...
  • In the Halo series, our hero does not normally have Super Drowning Skills, but some bodies of water, especially in the third game, are "instant-death water of uncrossability". There's also Frictionless Hills and Invisible Walls, some of which are lethal. And Border Patrol in multiplayer maps.
  • The two Red Faction games not only made strides to avert this trope by making much of the environment destroyable, but also sometimes required brute-force breaching to progress with the game. This feature, however, caused those points in the game that were obstructed by indestructible architecture to become only that much more conspicuous.
    • Interestingly it lead to another problem, where during an intense firefight one could accidentally create a very large pothole in the ground, get shot into it, and be unable to climb out without killing themselves. Also this troper remembers an interview in an online chat where one dev was asked that and handwaved it by saying indestructible structures were made of really expensive Unobtanium. Multiplayer levels do away with the problem by having unobtanium flooring beneath the rocky floor, so apparently they already thought of it.
  • Notably avoided (somewhat) in Deus Ex where the player, when faced with a wooden door can always just blow it open with explosives or knock it down with the energy sword. Though the METAL doors are still impassable.
  • There is a certain room in a cave in Star Fox Adventures which requires you to pointlessly trek a longer path around the room even though the entrance and exit to the room are mere feet away from each other, all because a small amount of short grass stands between them.
    • This room, as well as every other similar room in the game, is used to allow the game time to load the next area; using a Gameshark to hover over the grass, then walk through the tunnel on the other side, results in you seeing an area of nothing but sky, then the game freezing.
  • In the game Koudelka, the titular character justifies her unwillingness to go over a relatively short fence due to her modesty, one of the very few instances where this phenomenon is addressed in a way consistent with the setting and explained plausibly. Still, you'd think somebody so concerned about modesty wouldn't have dressed like that to begin with...
  • In Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, various areas are blocked off by rubble etc., which shouldn't hold too much difficulty for a group of Marvel superheroes. Not only that, but sometimes characters who can fly can completely surmount the barrier, only to find an Invisible Wall.
    • This also comes up in the boss fight against the giant Arcadebot, which requires players to shoot themselves out of a cannon to reach the robot's weak point, rather than simply flying up there.
  • In one level of Tomb Raider: Anniversary, you come across several cages. With vertical and horizontal bars, which look like they could be climbed like a ladder. Which you nevertheless cannot climb, for a game which features all sorts of climbing (and actual ladders) in other situations ...
  • In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion it is possible, through the use of multiply stacked buffs, to attain superhuman "Acrobatics" skill levels, at which point the use of Invisible Walls by the game designers becomes apparent, e.g. when the player cannot cross some pieces of rubble, despite obviously clearing them by a huge margin. On the other hand, even an unmodified Acrobatics skill, in the upper ranges of what is normally attainable, enables the player to reach the roof tops in several of the cities, and from there the city walls and thus the outside of the city - which should have been kept inaccessible, since this reveals that outside world is only an empty, low-resolution copy of the proper game world, which one reaches by exiting through the gates. In the expansion pack Shivering Isles this editor has witnessed some of the guardians patrolling the landscape being stymied by a combination of ankle deep water - which they refused to cross - and a slope that was just too steep to be climbed at their normal walking speed, so that they ended up treading in place for minutes on end.
    • This is a major step backwards from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, where you could climb, jump, or levitate over any barrier, and wade, swim, or walk across any body of water.
      • The only exception this troper found in Morrowind was in the Tribunal expansion, where it is impossible to leave the city that is the basis for the expansion.
    • The frictionless hill is also known to appear in Oblivion on most mountain faces.
      • Not quite true, as you can climb any mountain if you're moving fast enough or riding a horse. The game still has Invisible Walls surrounding the game area, though.
    • It should be noted that, in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and without increasing your starting Acrobatics, paintbrushes which are "dropped" remain hanging in air, allowing the creation of "invisible stairways" of paintbrushes to reach places unattainable even with stacked buffs. In case anyone wants to look for all the Invisible Walls.
  • Tony Montana in Scarface: The World Is Yours is a clear offender whose trespasses include the One Inch Too High Ledge and the Gentle Slope of Unclimbability. Despite being strong enough to run at a decent clip with a bazooka in hand, he cannot climb out of the deepest end of a wading pool. Also if you swim too far in the ocean you get eaten by a shark.
  • In Cave Story, early in the plot a locked door provides an obstacle, and a friendly nearby robot is willing to create explosives (out of chewing gum, for some reason) to break it open. This ignores the fact that the main character is equipped with a missile launcher...
    • Although since Cave Story is a 2D game, it probably has something to do with the fact that no matter how he tries your poor little protagonist can't actually point his missile launcher at the door.
      • Well, then again, the missile launcher could be more of an RPG, in which case it explodes with shrapnel rather than an actual high explosives kind of thing. Also, the door wasn't locked, it was rusted shut- if it were made of solid metal, it might require more than a handheld missile launcher/RPG to open it.
      • At the beginning of the game, the protagonist shoots and kills a monster door, proving that he can aim "at" doors. This troper will agree with the above bullet point's idea, however.
  • The 2-D Legend Of Zelda games provide many obvious examples of this, with a plethora of simple obstacles that nevertheless require you to find a powerup first. Move past a bush? Not without your sword. Step over a small rock? Forget it unless you got your power glove. A small tree? Nope, only if you got the fire wand.
    • The fences in Ocarina of Time's Hyrule field. While they come up to adult Link's waist, Link on Epona's back must jump over one in particular it as if it were a high fence, and only then at a very particular angle.
    • Sometimes subverted in A Link To The Past, where not all cracked walls are bombable. And there is one wall that looks impenetrable, but is bombable.
      • A Link To The Past also features the Book of Mudora sitting on top of a bookshelf. To get it down, Link has to go all the way to a dungeon on the other side of Hyrule, defeat countless monsters, and get the Sprint Shoes so he can ram the bookcase and the book will fall off. Instead of, you know... going to someone else's house and stealing a footstool or something.
  • In the Resident Evil game series the protagonists, even though they are either well trained members of the Raccoon City Police's special task-force S.T.A.R.S. and/or are able to perform insane stunts like jumping down stairs while fetching a gun in mid-air and shoot gas tanks to kill an entire team of evil grunts one-handed, are overstrained when facing old, battered wooden (read: adamantium) doors they don't have the right key for. This trope becomes especially comic if the player is circled by a pack of zombies who will tear him apart any second and his only escape route would be through an old rusty garden gate, but he'd rather stop any attempts of escaping saying to himself "It's locked. I don't have the right key to open it". Further, in numerous cut-scenes the protagonists find themselves in exactly the same situation, but will then suddenly remember their training back at the police academy and simply breach the door which leads to their escape route.
    • This gets even more ridiculous in the first Resident Evil game, where Jill Valentine, ex-Delta Force and current S.T.A.R.S member, complete with pistols, machine guns, and even rocket launchers, is equipped with a lock-pick and has been dubbed "The Master of Unlocking", still cannot go through the very same wooden doors. It gets even more absurd when a cut-scene in the game which shows Jill trapped in a locked room, ie the "Jill Sandwich" Descending Ceiling room, being rescued by another member who promptly just shoots the lock off the door to rescue her.
      • This isn't that implausable. Picking locks takes time and concentration, both of which being at the risk of becoming a Jill Sandwich will put in short supply. Some locks are harder to pick than others (not to mention quite a few of the "locks" aren't traditional cylinder locks, and probably can't be opened via traditional lockpicking), and since the whole point of the mansion was to act as a maze of sorts it's not implausable that Mr. Trevor varied the brands on different doors to thwart lockpicking.
      • What is unacceptable is that what set off the trap in the first place was Jill picking up a loaded shotgun.
    • Resident Evil 4 however, with its redefined control scheme, makes it easy to just hit the Action button to jump over any sufficiently low fence when prompted. Of course, this only serves to make the game's proper insurmountable waist height fences more jarring when you have to perform an irritating Fetch Quest for a gate key instead of just jumping over the gate.
      • Even worse was the 'Separate Ways' bonus chapters present in the PS 2 and subsequent versions of the game, in which you get to play as Ada Wong. The girl with the Legend Of Zelda style hookshot that can attach to anything. Since the device was entirely governed by action commands, the game just dictated when you could zip over obstacles, and when you had to run off on a 16-room detour.
    • In Resident Evil 5, there's a Light And Mirrors Puzzle wherein the light kills you, and you have to figure out a way to point it where you want without blocking yourself in, ignoring the fact that you could easily get on the ground and crawl under the light.
  • The literal insurmountable waist-high fence in Paper Mario. Early in the game, when you first get to toad town, you'll see a Star Piece on the other side of a fence, which you have absolutely no way of getting past until you get Sushie 5 chapters later, even though you can jump HIGHER than the fence to begin with.
    • Or how about even earlier, in Goomba Village? Kammy taunts Mario, and drops a Yellow Block on the gate out. Even though Mario can easily jump higher than the nose-high fencing, he can't actually jump over. Same with the fence at the bottom of the cliff the Goomba house is built on: it, too, is blocked with a Yellow Block, and you can't jump the fence. But in both cases, this is a good thing, as if the game didn't force you to get the Hammer, you'd be stopped by later obstacles and unable to harm some of even the earliest enemies, but still, it's a good thing the Hammer didn't fall on the other side of the fence, or Mario would be stuck... forever.
  • Kingdom Hearts is an exception to this trope mostly due to incredibly well designed levels that allow you to go nearly anywhere you can jump. Only in a few places do you come in contact with invisible walls, almost all belonging to the level in which you can fly. Kingdom Hearts 2 is a prime example of this trope, however, where an overturned semi blocks your passage even though you can jump higher than the truck and the surface on top of the truck appears flat, leaving this editor baffled by why he couldn't land on it.
  • Happens a lot in Drakengard, especially in any scenes involving ruins or recently-destroyed buildings.
  • The original Super Mario Kart had this problem, but even worse. All barriers during the races were flat on the ground, being, at most, ankle high. Yet they were completely impassable. In one of the battle stages, you can jump over the barriers into the little puddles. So inability to jump elsewhere is a case of Invisible Walls.
  • Pokémon is an interesting example: Your character can jump down ledges that appear to be only knee high, but not back up them. The bikes in the newer games make this problem even weirder, as you can now ride your bike up a mudslide twice as tall as your character or bunnyhop up tiny footholds in a cliff face but still can't go over these tiny bumps.
    • This is due to the way the sprites worked in the older games; the ledges were supposed to be much taller than they looked.
      • Given that your character also can't just squeeze past Cuttable trees, the logical conclusion is that they're a fatty.
      • The logical conclusion would be to just blast the tree with flamethrower or hyper beam.
    • Another ridiculous example is in the Old Château and the Canalave Library in Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum, where you can't step over books lying on the ground.
  • Averted in Net Hack, where you can do things like use pick-axes to laboriously dig through the dungeon rock to make new paths. This is coupled with being able to break down doors and generally destroy most of the environment if you have enough resources to do so. (Though be careful if there's a shopkeeper on the other side of the door!) Note that the edges of the two-dimensional world still qualify as an Invisible Wall.
    • And also a Fourth Wall, use a stethoscope in the "up" direction and you'll hear a faint typing noise. NetHack is awesome.
    • In Alphaman, a comedy game similar to Net Hack, if the player has a jackhammer, he/she can sometimes jack through the exterior walls of a building. When that happens, the player can walk the black void of the outside of the house, and if they leave the screen, they're taken out of the house to the land near the house. Also sort of an example of Super Drowning Skills, because without a wetsuit, raft, kayak, or something similar, the player drowns in deep water.
  • In Terranigma, you can jump. Sometimes you can jump over gaps. Other times, you run into an invisible wall. Sometimes you can jump down deep holes in the ground. Other times, you just take damage and are put back where you fell from. Still other times, you hit invisible walls. The only way to find out is to try.
  • Sid Meier's Pirates! uses a literal Insurmountable Waist High Fence, to the player's advantage. During the stealth segments of the game, the player can leap over a fence to avoid guards, who, despite being able to see you clearly on the other side, are too fat and lazy to climb over and arrest you.
  • Sometimes justified in Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Sometimes the obstacles make sense, like the fact the alley way in on fire, or the stairs are blocked by burning debris. Other times he can't climb over a single row of crates. But that could be because he is carrying a small armory by that time.
  • Most racing games have the track walled in by insurmountable adamantium barriers; even the "plastic netting" is impenetrable. Sometimes, as in the Test Drive games, there will be open intersections with cross traffic, but they are blocked to you by Invisible Walls. Said invisible walls also usually prevent you from jumping off the track to your doom.
  • Gran Turismo IV has particularly strong plastic fences. On the Grand Canyon rally course, part of the course travels along the very edge of a cliff with only a foot-tall plastic home depot orange netting keeping a runaway car (or Truck) from careening off the edge. Somehow this flimsy-looking fencing handles the task incredibly well, even so far as bringing a full size Dodge Ram truck doing well over freeway speed to a dead stop.
    • On some tracks in Gran Turismo 3, you can glitch your way through the barrier. If you go too far out of bounds, the game freezes.
  • The most excessive example of this comes from Baten Kaitos. In this game world, everyone has wings. Everyone. There's a lot of nifty flying animation in battle, and yet you still get the same variety of of jumping and bridging puzzles that would be completely passable if you thought to fly outside of battle when it was useful, rather than when it just looked cool.
  • Partially justified in the game Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee. Munch is a Gabbit, a one-legged amphibian, and though he can jump more than six feet out of the water, any attempt to jump on land just makes him fall flat on his face. Abe, on the other hand, is a ground-dwelling Mudokon, and can jump really high on the ground (though he has Super Drowning Skills, and can only touch water for a few seconds before dying). However, other Mudokons are too stupid and lazy to jump over a waist high fence, they have to be picked up one by one (by the ass) and thrown over fences. Munch can also clear small fences by jumping over them in his wheelchair, or getting a boost from Abe.
  • Apparently, this is so well-known that audiences at GDC '08 actually laughed when they saw a character in the upcoming Fable 2 simply jump over a waist-high fence.
    • Which will be a relief, as the original Fable was absolutely full of insurmountable fences, rivers, edges, invisible walls, weeds, etc.
    • The fence problem may be largely gone but I've run into quite a few Gentle Slopes of Impassability.
  • If you can't stand this trope, don't play Travians. The game concept appears to be made entirely around this trope and Broken Bridge. You can't deviate from little paths that run everywhere, even to cross entirely empty fields so as to bypass the wagon blocking the path. You can't use the axe you got to chop wood to chop the beech tree, and the special axe you get to chop the beech tree you can't use to chop either a small branch blocking one road or a fallen tree blocking another. (This despite the fact that the special axe is specifically given to you more than a one-use item, so it presumably has other uses down the line.) And you can walk through woody areas if the game lets you but not less densely wooded areas if the game really wants you to take the path around.
  • Dreamfall is full of these, this editor's favorite being insurmountable ankle-height rope. Particularly jarring since Zoë is otherwise keen on pointing out and complaining about adventure game cliches but this one is played straight.
  • Averted in the first two Avernum games, which are specifically set in underground caverns with natural boundaries. Finding your way to the surface ends the game. In the third game they resort to a giant magical wall across one end of the continent.
    • That wall is there for a reason, you know - the entire bloody continent is quarantined.
  • Breath of Fire III puts you on a diversion that seems like it takes up a third of the game, simply to get around one of these fences.
  • Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney, of all games, has one. A witness argues that she can't be the murderer because a tree had fallen across the path from her location to the crime scene. This troper tried to argue that anyone with four functioning limbs could climb over the tree or just cut through the woods on either side, and was dinged for it.
    • If I remember correctly, it was less a question of whether it was possible to get to the crime scene and more about whether it was possible to get to the crime scene within the time necessary to commit the murder and set up everything the way it was found.
    • I believe they determined that the only way to get there in time was to take the van, which certainly cannot climb over fallen trees or cut through forests.
    • In the third case from the first game, a significant portion of the case involves a camera that automatically takes pictures of anyone that walks through an archway on the way to the crime scene. The characters act on the assumption that a picture was thus taken of anyone who walked to the crime scene; at no point does anyone point out that someone could have just walked around the archway to avoid getting their picture taken (or even just walked directly under the camera, as its orientation clearly couldn't take pictures of things directly beneath it).
  • Lampshade Hanging in the online game Graal Classic, when Kull's Castle blocked certain doors with impassable Bottles. Your character is even heard to remark "I can't go this way - there's a bottle in the way!"
  • In Diablo, the town of Tristram is delimited on all sides by these. A waist-high stone wall to the northeast, a river to the southeast that's maybe a metre wide and 30 cm deep. The western border is blocked by moderately large rocks (150 tall at most).
  • In the Metroid Prime series there are some just too high cliffs that, if you exploit some cheap tricks (like jumping onto inch-thick vines) you can actually get over (and into glitch worlds, in order to do some sequence breaking). Not technically an aversion because the game was specifically made with the intent that you couldn't get over these cliffs.
  • The Call Of Duty games are absolutely crazy about this. This troper has found himself facing a knee high fence he couldn't step past. And if there's some rubble, "this road's closed, we have to go the other way!". *sigh*
    • It does avert it in a way though, you can shoot through doors and thin wooden walls like on barns. Most games of this type treat any barrier as bulletproof.
  • Every Grand Theft Auto game until San Andreas, along with the later PSP sequels, leading some reviewers to comment on their inferiority.
  • College Saga parodies this (just like it parodies everything else). "A huge chair is blocking your path". Once Jesus joins your party, he averts the trope by simply blowing the chair up.
  • Twisted Metal 2 has a level set in a Holland tulip field. The field is bordered by a small wooden fence which cannot be destroyed or jumped over, whereas the two sturdy windmills in the field go down easy.
  • In the Golden Sun games, your path is often blocked by lines of PEBBLES
  • The MMORPG Ryzom is full of these, both of the waist high fence and invisible wall varieties. The invisible walls can be particularly aggravating, as anything steeper than a very gentle slope seems to have one.
  • The hero in the maddening old Nintendo game Spelunker died if he fell into a pit that was half the size of his body.
  • Skies Of Arcadia has Insurmountable Dark Patches Of Sand keeping you from straying from the path connecting the two halves of the town of Maramba.
  • zOMG! features several Insurmountable Waist High Fences. The stairs out of the Train Station are chained off, forcing you to fight your way through the Sewers (Which also serves as the game's tutorial). Of course, the doors out of the station are locked too, and jumping the gate would mean missing out getting the rings you need to get any farther than Barton Town. Though when you can't step over a 2 inch ledge in the Zen Gardens, you start to suspect something...
  • It's not waist-high, but the rubble/debris piles in Fallout 3 are arranged in such a way that any normal person could climb over them. You, however? Can't.
    • Keep trying. This troper found that many were actually climbable providing you place your jumps well enough. Word of warning, though: this can sometimes get you stuck and unable to move, and unable to quick travel if there is an enemy in the area (though if you fire wildly around you might attract and then kill them).
    • There are also innumerable Adamantium Doors, many of whom appear to be made of wood... some even with large holes through which a normal person could just reach and unlock the other side. Aggravatingly, the trope is partially inverted in that you can force many doors with your bare hands... but you only get the option if you've got enough Lockpicking skill to open it anyway via the lockpicking Mini Game. The fact that you get nuclear weapons early in the game never enters into consideration.
    • I've dubbed these "Invisible walls pretending to be piles of rubble"
    • The earlier Fallout games play the trope much more directly. Because of how the game deals with shop inventories many of the merchants in the game have their items stashed in containers on the map just beyond the player's vision and, thanks to various waist-high obstacles, beyond their reach as well. At least one of these inventories in Fallout 2 can be accessed with patient skirting of a waist-high fence, not that it really breaks the game at all.
  • The insurmountable waist-high fences (and sometimes other obstacles) felt especially egregious in the Crusader games, where you were an unstoppable Super Soldier and had guns that could blow up most of the scenery, but would at most deform metal fences, and not enough for you to climb over them. (In the games' defense, you couldn't jump for shit. Maybe that armor was really tight around the crotch.)
    • See also Sigmateam's Alien Shooter, an isometric shooter where the final weapon is some sort of shoulder-fired nuclear-powered gatling gun...which still cannot seem to destroy basic office equipment. Perhaps the aliens should have made their armour out of cheap Chinese plastic instead.
  • Eternal Sonata features some insurmountable sticks on the ground, especially in Mt. Rock. Oddly enough, standing behind one of these sticks will cause an enemy on the other side of the stick to be seemingly unable to see you.
  • Nightmare Creatures for the N64 had waist high fences that could be destroyed. Or walked upon to get to bonuses. Shoulder high fences were insurmountable by the gymnastic, monster-slaughtering hero...the villain could hop them with impunity.
  • Gleefully subverted in Mirror's Edge, where the main character is an excellent parkour artist, able to scale obstacles that seem unscalable. Which was, in fact, this troper's problem early in the game—she didn't quite grok that Faith actually could just run up and over some of the obstacles.
    • Also subverted in Assassin's Creed, where every building can be climbed with ease. Although the general public tend to lose their shit at the sight of some robed nutter climbing their houses, so you may wanna keep it on the down low.
  • City Of Heroes both wildly averts this trope and plays it... er... mostly straight. The aversion comes in when you step into the tutorial and discover that your character can perform a roughly eight-foot standing jump, and clear a good twenty feet horizontally if they take a bit of a run at it (hey, you're a superhero, what do you expect?). The 'mostly straight' is in the War Walls that form the boundaries of most zones, although in fairness, those are 'impassable thousand-foot-high hundred-foot-thick-concrete-walls-topped-with-forcefields' rather than 'impassable waist height fences'.
    • On the other hand, you have incidental obstacles such as vehicles, telephone poles, shelving, dumpsters, garbage cans, and cardboard boxes that your level 50 SUPER STRENGTH endowed Brick cannot even SCRATCH, much less move.... and if you try and jump aboard a moving car, a boat, or try to land atop the blimp that circles Atlas Park, you slide off as if your feet were buttered.
  • Condemned makes this troper grind his teeth in frustration. It's not uncommon for a tipped-over shelf to completely block a door, preventing Ethan Thomas from passing when he could have easily shoved it out of the way. In the sequel, it's made even more frustrating in that Ethan can now climb through windows, slip through gaps, climb boxes, and jump down pits, but only when demanded by the very linear level design. It makes it very frustrating to be in a hotel and see a luggage cart and reception desk blocking your path, requiring you to find the small, foot-wide area where you can press the magic button to slip through. Of course, Ethan can never do this in other circumstances, such as climbing over a few cardboard boxes and a couch instead of needing to use a conveniently-placed ramp. The worst part is that oftentimes players will struggle to find a context-sensitive area that allows them to progress, or spend time searching for an alternate route when Ethan can just climb through the hole. He can't even climb fences or gates that are locked behind the people he's pursuing, yet attacking enemies can vault over them no problem. It led to this troper and his friends making constant references to "plot-dictated athletics".
    • Also, Ethan lacks the ability to jump (again, unless it's part of the level design). The issue? Physics objects, like garbage cans, can easily fall in the player's path, yet Ethan can't jump over them and will be stopped in his tracks by an ankle-high cardboard box, requiring the player to kick it out of the way.
  • Integral to much of the level design in Doom, where any protrusion above knee height might as well have been Mount Everest until you found the right button to lower it. A number of source ports have since added jumping to the game, which allows players to skip huge swaths of some of the classic levels by simply hopping over these obstacles.
  • According to the Official Playstation Review of Killzone 2, there's a particularly bad example. The player's squadmates can climb over a fence with no problem, but the Player Character needs their help to get over the exact same type of fence.
  • Crysis mostly averts this. However, after a while, one begins to notice that the entire island is made of valleys with walls just slightly too steep to climb and just slightly too high to jump over.
    • Crysis Warhead doesn't. While you can drive down trees with your Armoured Personnel Carrier and blow up whole buildings with nothing but a grenade, you will still get stuck (sometimes permanently) in the same flimsy wood fences that you could kick down even if you weren't a nano-suit augmented super soldier.
  • Parodied in Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude. When Larry examines a road construction site, he says it's a cheap way to block off the player from wandering off the level.
  • Fences in the MMO Runescape are sometimes not even waist high and yet a character can not go over them. There are certain spots where a character with high enough agility can cross by climbing over. Other than those, though, you basically have to go around the long way in order to get where you want to go. And some of these fences seem to cross entire continents!
    • And the uncrossable water appears as well. The several rivers that appear in the game are all uncrossable despite being a few feet wide and inches deep. And the PC is shown many times in the game to be capable of swimming, including in a couple of fairly large areas that are underwater, yet cannot cross these very small rivers.
  • Mostly whenever you see a fence in From Software's Evergrace, it's to keep you from dying as the other side is either a puddle of water or a drop off a cliff. This in turn, marks one of the few times you'll wish for this trope's existence, since falling off of anything means your doom. In the bonus dungeon, there are no fences, but there are a HECK of a lot of enemies with knockback. Which turns a simple challenging dungeon Nintendo Hard instantaneously. Later on, it gains floors which turn from invisible to visible and back, slowly, enemies can come onto them, and there's STILL no fences to save you.
  • I remember watching my friend play Rule of Rose, when you get in a fight in certain areas, children surround you with very low barrier things to keep you in, needless to say it worked, and she hated it. A little later in the game she turned back to me and said "There's a broom on the floor... It's in my way."
  • Since you can't jump in the Perfect Dark games, any object taller than ankle height is insurmountable, e.g. overturned furniture blocking a hallway.
  • Silent Hill hits this one early on. In most outdoor areas, you're navigating a map to try to get from point A to point B, but many of the roads are blocked, either by Bottomless Pits or insurmountable roadblocks. At one point in the second game, you're stopped by police caution tape. Yes, your character cannot get past police caution tape. Oddly, he is able to climb through a broken gate at one point.
  • Pikmin 2 has short rocks in some of the caves. Justified But in this game, you can't jump.
  • Thief subverts this in several ways - a locked door can be picked if you don't have the key. If you just suck at picking locks (some are harder then others), your sword can bash the (wooden) door into oblivion - as long as you don't mind every guard coming to investigate the racket.
  • Sweet Home takes this to ridiculous levels. Rope on the floor? You'll need Kazou's lighter to get by it. Shards of broken glass? Asuka's vacuum is the only way around that. Shallow ditch in the ground? You need a board to cross it. There are a whole bunch of obstacles that simply cause damage and allow you to walk over them, though.
  • Need For Speed series: In most of the games, you hit an invisible barrier if you try to jump the fence, but in the later tracks of II, there are spots where you can jump the barrier and fall into Bottomless Pits.
  • Worldof Warcraft's environment is largely immune from the damaging attacks of Player characters, and it has even become a selling point of the latest expansion dungeon, that there are vehicles which can destroy parts of the internal dungeon's defenses. The most straightforward application of this is usually in a major city where there is a door visible, but no means of which to enter, or out in the less populated areas, where there will be a visible portal, which leads to nowhere, or cannot be entered at all. In the latter case, its usually a sign of a possible future dungeon entrance. Players who circumvent these barriers through glitches could be equally punished or rewarded by the G Ms (As some sections are clearly NOT meant for the player to get to, while others serve as more of an Easter Egg bonus).
  • At one point in Leisure Suit Larry 5, Passionate Patti is Locked In A Room by way of an Insurmountable Microphone Stand.
  • Any and all Legend Of Zelda games involving the hook/clawshot. Walls and ceilings are, for the most part, completely immune to getting latched on - even the wooden ones.
  • In Mother 3, if you attempt to exit the first area of the game (which is the area around Alec's home), you will bump into an invisible wall and receive a message that reads, "There are ants at your feet. You might accidentally step on them, so please don't continue in that direction." Ants.
  • In Korean MMORPG Mabinogi, some areas are littered with waist-high — and even knee-high or ankle-high — insurmountable obstacles; mostly fences, bushes, and rocks. The truly odd thing is that some areas have very low bushes which are insurmountable, while other areas have much taller bushes that characters can walk right through. This may be partly intentional; as it presents an obstacle to bots using the game's auto-walk map system.
  • Spiderweb Software's Geneforge series of games subverts this a bit. No matter how powerful your character gets, he is never able to break through/into relatively flimsy doors and cabinets. However, he is still able to pick the locks on such, using a combination of mechanical skills and "living tools".
  • Eternam has what can only be described as an ankle high fence. Rocks on the other hand, can be walked through.
  • In World Of Mana, it's sometimes rather difficult to tell the difference between regular backgrounds and impassible ones, so it occasionally looks like your progress is balked by slightly gritty dirt. Additionally, in Seiken Densetsu 3 you're blocked by an insurmountable optical illusion that you can't get around unless you talk to the right NPC and then use the Lumina element on said illusion.
  • In Overlord the waist high obstacles are further highlighted by the green minions, who can make amazing leaps when attacking enemies but otherwise remain just as glued to the ground as the other types. In some places, they can even end up stuck on or behind the Waist Height Fences while attacking, because they can't jump anymore after all the enemies are dead.
  • The So Bad Its Horrible Zelda-clone based on the Winx Club animated series includes several plot-based fence obstacles, completely ignoring the fact that the protagonists aren't called "winx" for nothing, and can fly easily.
  • Played so very straight in Robert Ludlum's "The Bourne Identity" where most every object is an impassable barrier despite the player being JASON BOURNE. At one point it got so bad that a stairway was blocked by a simple red rope barrier forcing the player to go all the way round.
  • Metal Gear Solid has one specific moment where this is gratingly apparent. The protagonist Solid Snake, a veteran special forces soldier, runs down the stairs in a tower for several floors, only to be thwarted when the bottom five feet of the stairs have collapsed. Any normal adult could easily drop down that height without injury.
    • Five feet? I'm pretty sure it was more like five STORIES!
  • In Mario And Luigi Bowswers Inside Story, a good chunk of the game is spent collecting the magical MacGuffins needed to get past the barriers blocking Peach's castle, completly ignoring the fact the barriers only block the bridge and not the very wide area on either side of it, which is even more ridiculous when you realize you have someone who can both fly AND carry both Mario and Luigi effortlessly.
    • It also has a pretty wide spreading example in Bowser himself as a playable character, since he can't jump, half his adventuring has you try and figure out ways round very small ledges that Mario and Luigi themselves can simply jump right over.
  • Not an in-game example; but the maker of this Blood Bowl Let's Play is possibly a troper; occasionally referring to a line of dwarven players as in Insurmountable Waist High Fence. With beards.
  • Real-time-strategy game example: In Star Craft, buildings and even units can be used to construct a blockade which enemy has to destroy to get past. This is very notable with Protoss pylons which block way more space than it seems.
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